2007 — 27 September: not quite Friday, yet!

Time now (07:40) and nearly ready for the final dose of rads this week. Yesterday, the consultant expressed himself delighted with the shrinking of the main
tumour at the three-quarters point of this treatment course. This has, he feels sure, bought us an extension of our remaining time together, though he's
naturally unwilling to specify by how much. (It occurs to us that when he says "I don't know" he really means it.)

Christa is in much less pain1 — to the point where we're decreasing the amount of daily morphine for a while
to see how that goes. She can also
now sit for a few minutes at a time on some of the magic cushions, which is a great help.

Tiny perturbation to the plan... department

We now have another radiation session tomorrow morning in place of the one set for next Tuesday. Keeps us on our toes. And, we hope, glowing
with further improved health for our anniversary.

One of those days... department

Dashed out in glorious sunshine and cold wind for the repeat prescriptions, the paper bill, and another litre of milk (what do we
do with it all?) — must be all that tea we make. Then into Eastleigh to drop off a bunch of surplus kitchen
stuff at the first available charity shop (the heart folk, this time) and grab some stuff from Lidl and (importantly) the last available
"well-fired" loaf from Sainsbury's. These mostly get snapped up at about 9 o'clock each morning but it turns out you can reserve them to pick up at a
specific day and time. Neat.

Back for the midday meal and then noticed (to my slight surprise, for the first time in ages, given my general level of stress and tiredness since [roughly
speaking] May this year) the flickering visual zig-zags at the edge of my field of view that I was once told are a typical precursor to migraine, though
I've2 never actually had a migraine headache. So, on with the sleep mask, saved from somebody's Air New Zealand
flight somewhere at some time (not me) and on to the bed; next thing I know, it's two hours later for the pair of sleeping babes. Excellent, though not
the way to get much done of course.

Tonight's first order of enjoyable business (apart from the stream of meds, etc.) is to repeat the 15 minutes or so of vital plot near the end
of A room with a view that slipped past underneath Her radar while She dozed yesterday evening. I should have noticed sooner. Perhaps a final
crack at the last couple of crossword clues, too. But an early night as we can no longer have the lie-in we were hoping for tomorrow!

Footnotes

1 There was a grimly fascinating article in the June 2006 Scientific American called
"Toward better pain control" about the various drugs that can interrupt the cascade of signals transmitting pain to the brain. This jolly
nearly is rocket science.
2 My mother always claimed to be a sufferer, and I believe there may be a genetic component
at work.